Date: Friday , October 07, 2016 With a vision to support local artisans, weavers, clusters, and village communities, iShippo serves as an e-Commerce platform that enables people from across the world to buy, sell and interact with each other.

India has more than 3100 startups per year standing just behind U.S., UK and Israel, according to the NASSCOM report of 2015. If this startup growth continues in the same pace, then it is expected that Indian tech startups will generate almost 2.5 lakh jobs in the next five years. India is also said to enjoy a great demographic dividend of 1.3 billion people and by 2020, it will be home to 112 million working population falling in the age bracket of 20-24 years as compared to that of 94 million workers of China. This demographic dividend will definitely boost the startup culture in the country.

Developed economies are looking to gain from India’s huge bludgeoning middle class. In recent years, several countries have taken initiatives to link up their businesses with the Indian startups in various sectors including defense. These joint ventures bring in FDI and help boost the India’s growth.

Going global, however, has its own set of challenges. For a startup, the biggest challenge in venturing into the highly competitive global market is building a great quality product. One of the major reasons why customers shift from one product to another is simplicity & quality of user-experience.

When a startup is growing globally, you have to be ready to face new constraints. We\'ve long heard about the challenges that multi-national corporations have to make in order to adapt to do business in India. Business models that work in other countries aren\'t always suited for the Indian market. Companies also learn that they need to localize their product or services for the Indian market. Today our Indian companies are starting to expand in other countries and they face the same localization problem in those countries.

As more and more Indian companies turn to expand into global market, they will have to reset expectations, learn and adapt to the new markets as well, each with their own nuances and complexities.

Successful Indian start-ups have managed to cater to our diverse Indian market, which essentially covers a multitude of customer profiles/personas. As Indian startups achieve excellence with customers in India, we will be well placed to scale our products and services across the globe. People now accept that good quality products are being produced in countries like India.

That being said, every market is different, and entrepreneurs will have to understand their target group and markets. What works for one market need not necessarily work for another. With more startups, India can aspire to be a world leader to produce and manufacture significant things that could change the course of our human race and the planet. India is not just an outsourcing destination for cheap goods or services.

So what direction should India take? Globally, there is a surge of technological advances in the manufacturing & service sectors with the dawn of the Extreme Automation era. The trifecta of 3D Printing, Robotics & Artificial Intelligence are disrupting manufacturing and services sector as never before.

In February 2016, a stunning President Obama’s report to Congress concludes the probability that 83 percent of job workers making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose their jobs to a machine in less than a decade. To counter this eventuality of human job loss & unemployment, countries have started a B.I.G movement (Basic Income Guarantee) – an income that is guaranteed to a human if their job is replaced by a Robot or AI. The recent referendum for B.I.G in Switzerland didn’t go through. However, the fact that they even considered B.I.G for a referendum and vote is acknowledging that the future has a lot of unemployment for humans.

The Robotics & Artificial Intelligence revolution has brought into a rapid pace of development, as mega-corporations see humans as inefficient resource as compared to Robots or AI that can work 25/7/365. We now have fully autonomous self-driving cars, virtual secretary, legal experts, suicide bomber robot, and many others.

Corporations profit by getting the maximum work for the least amount of time/resource/money spent; so it is not too hard to believe that it is in the best interest of corporation to invest in systems that will make production easier, faster and cheaper. Hence, Robots and AI provide the best bang for the corporations’ buck. This is the reason companies are investing in the future of Robots and AI hoping that it brings in a time of abundance & huge profitability.

In the unfolding scenarios, the question to ask is what would happen to India’s 1.2 billion demographic dividend that is majorly agrarian & manual labour oriented? How will they cope to these virulent changes coming soon? What will happen to the custodians of our cultural heritage our communities of weaver, artisans, and craftsmen, who still etch out a living using their hands?